“I would do anything to get my heroin fixx. One time I had a bit of heroin left in a pipe. I couldn’t get it out of the pipe so I tried to cut the pipe open with a knife. I kept trying and trying and accidentally I cut through my tendon. My entire hand was bleeding but I didn’t care. I just wanted the drugs. When I went to the hospital the next day, they weren’t able to recover it anymore. The drugs were controlling my life. Just like in 2007 I was offered money and heroin by two men. I had a bad feeling about it but I was so addicted that I got into the car with them anyways. They drove me a bit outside of the city and took me to an apartment in where there were two other man. To be honest I still don’t know what exactly happened but they raped me. They beat me up and they threatened me with a knife telling me they would kill me. The kicked me off the stairs and later I was found by a bus driver and he brought me to the hospital. I was so scared I could no longer work on the streets. If I wanted to keep living, I knew something had to change..” (3/5)

“When I turned 18 I met an Englishman who had recently opened a bar. He asked me to work for him and for the first time in my life I felt that I belonged somewhere. I was working day and night but never before I had been so happy. Finally I had a purpose. After a few months a client offered me my first line of cocaine. In the next month they offered me more. I was using cocaine every night. I had no idea about the consequences of drugs. Until one night that I hadn’t been using which made me feel extremely tired. That is when I realized that I couldn’t function in the bar without drugs. One month later the bar went bankrupt and I had nowhere to go. Meanwhile I had fallen in love with a Colombian man. I was using cocaine and he was a dealer. When I lost my job he asked me if I was interested in making a trip to Colombia to smuggle drugs. I wasn’t aware of any danger, really I had no idea. I smuggled drugs for him a few times and everything went well until I got arrested in France while I was pregnant with his child. I was handcuffed to the bed while I gave birth to my daughter. The mother of my best friend picked up my daughter when she was 10 months old and adopted her. In this french prison I had no access to drugs. When I got out I was clean but I always say that when getting clean is not your own choice it doesn’t count because for you will use again. The moment I arrived in Amsterdam, drugs was the first thing on my mind. I had nowhere to go so I went straight to the “Red light district”. Slowly I started using heroin and became a prostitute.“ (2/5)

“Heroin made me a different person. At some point I weighed about 45 kilos. I was constantly under influence. One day I was told I was nog longer welcome in the coffee shop I would always hang out. I was told that I scared away costumers. I was devastated. The coffee shop was the last place I was able to go and have small conversations with people. I returned to the tent I was sleeping in at the time and I grabbed my knife. I wanted to cut my wrists but I didn’t have the courage to end my life. When I woke up the next day I applied for a methadone program. I promised myself to not steal and use drugs for at least 6 weeks. It was hard. I became very sick for days but I kept on going. After 6 weeks I was still part of the program. I went to pick up my mail at my postbox. I received two letters. Both of them were offers for apartments. After 9 years of waiting and living on the street I finally had the opportunity to live in a house. It was a sign of God, rewarding me for trying to quit. I had gotten a second chance and I was more confident than ever to now screw it up. That was 20 years ago and i’m still going strong!” (4/4)

“I have been homeless since I was 18. The first time I tried heroin it made me really sick but I still enjoyed it. After a few days of using it I was addicted. I was spending about 250 euro’s a day on drugs. At some point I weighed 45 kilos. I lived like a rat. I was sleeping on cartons, in tents or garages and under staircases. Sometimes during a bad bad trip, I thought about the man who had sexually abused me as a child. In the middle of the night I would scroll through the yellow pages, calling everyone with his surname hoping to find him. I wanted him to know what he had done to me. It didn’t change anything but I was just so angry..” (¾)

“At school I’d get bullied a lot. At the age of 12 I realized that if I was violent myself, kids in school would leave me alone. I became an extremely aggressive person. By the time I left primary school, I was hanging out with the wrong crowd of friends. They all smoked hash and soon I became addicted myself. I skipped many classes and soon I dropped out of school. I would spend most of my time smoking hash in the coffee shop. The coffee shop became the only place where I felt a sense of belonging. When I was seventeen I got kicked out of my parent’s house. I had no where to go so I went to the only place I knew, the coffeeshop. The owners of the shop had a spare room so they offered me to live there. Soon I started to deliver packages for them. I never knew what was in those packages, I didn’t ask but I knew it wasn’t legal. I was smoking so much, that it no longer had an impact on me. I wanted to experience something new so I started to look for alternatives and I bought cocaine from a prostitute in the “Red light district”. I enjoyed it so much that I started using regularly. I was making a lot of money delivering packages and I still owned a few thousand euro’s that my grandmother had saved up for me. I spent it all on drugs. When the owners of the coffee shop found out I was using cocaine, they kicked me out. I had become unreliable and they didn’t trust me anymore. I lost my house and soon I lost all my money. I was 18 years old and living on the street without a place to go..“ (2/4)